Climate Depot

ClimateDepot.com is the website of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow employee Marc Morano, a conservative global warming skeptic who previously served as environmental communications director for Sen. James Inhofe. Launched in spring 2009, Climate Depot is intended to be "the Senate EPW website on steroids," and "the most comprehensive information center on climate news and the related issues of environment and energy."

Launch Hype
"ClimateDepot.com, spearheaded by Morano, will serve as an information clearinghouse and one stop shopping for reporters, policymakers, students, scientists and concerned citizens to get the latest information on global warming and other key environmental and energy issues. The news center will offer a balanced perspective and serve as an ombudsman of the 4th Estate’s Eco-Reporting. The news center is a special project of CFACT, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy organization that has been working since 1985 to infuse the environmental debate with a balanced perspective, and to promote market-based and safe technological solutions to various public-interest concerns," Morano stated in the media release announcing the project.

According to Web site traffic site Compete.com, Climate Depot had as many as 168,000 unique visitors in a month.

Morano has also established a presence on Twitter as "climatedepot" (http://twitter.com/climatedepot).

Funding
ClimateDepot.com is being financed by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues. Public tax filings for 2003-7 (the last five years for which documents are available) show that the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the ExxonMobil Foundation and foundations associated with the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime financier of conservative causes, including being the primary source of money used to fund attacks against Bill Clinton during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky eras of his presidency. According to a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, from 1998-2005, approximately 23% of the total ExxonMobil funding for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow was directed by ExxonMobil for climate change activities [p. 32].

Craig Rucker, a co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, said the committee got a third of its money from other foundations. However, Rucker would not identify them or say how much his foundation would pay Marc Morano. Rucker did say that ExxonMobil did not contribute anything to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow in 2008.

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Global warming
 * Global warming skeptics
 * Marc Morano

External articles

 * Leslie Kaufman, "Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign", New York Times, April 9, 2009.